Right now he and his team are inspecting the poisoned bait they laid a few days ago, he says, when they sprinkled the place with pesticides and closed it down on orders from City Hall. My father knows all the official regulations, he’s an authority, he knows how to combat the rat menace. No, they don’t use traps and a piece of cheese anymore, they don’t have cats or brooms to chase them with, no señor. Not even the Nogat powders — Nogat: Terror of the Rats — they’re old-fashioned; my father has a Colt 45. When he grows up, he says, he will also devote himself to getting rid of all kinds of pests: rats, bugs, fleas, cockroaches and green lice.
The little dog is standing patiently on the pavement, listing slightly to one side. Its owner keeps looking furtively around him; the boy can see he is also precariously balanced, and the dandruff on his shoulders is like a layer of ash. The man nods, he’s well aware of what happened in the cinema. In the middle of the magician Fu-Ching’s performance, he says, a pair of rodents appeared on stage out of nowhere. Many in the public thought it was part of the act, and applauded, but not him. He was in the front row and immediately knew what was going on: they were two enormous, disgustingly real rats, the size of rabbits. They stood defiantly in front of the footlights baring their fangs, and soon panic and confusion spread among the audience.
“Do you realise how blind and stupid people have become, my boy?” the little man mutters, looking round him as though in search of visual support. “When did you ever see such a thing? Just imagine, the audience could clearly see they were rats — they were right in front of them, hairy and repulsive, and yet they all wanted to think it was a magic trick! No-one dares see things for what they are these days!”
Ringo shuts his eyes, trying to imagine the uproar and fear of people stampeding through the stalls of the cinema that night, but the golden thighs of Chen-Li the Puss in Boots are still glowing beneath his eyelids, and for now there is no room for anything else.
“That’s because they’re blue rats, señor. My father explained to me that blue rats suck your blood. And when they die,” he goes on, frowning, “they go up and guard the evening stars.”
“Your father. I see, I see.”
“You may not have seen them, but they’re a plague. And something else. When the magician Fu-Ching pulls a rabbit out of his hat, it’s because it was already there, isn’t it?”
“Ah, who knows? But I’ll tell you one thing. This beautiful Chen-Li is about as Chinese as I am Japanese. Take my word for it.”
“Please, señor, tell me the truth.”
“The truth, the truth! Not worth a fig these days.”
With stiff fingers he shakes the dandruff blooming on his black, shabby shoulders. He stands pensively staring at the nothing in front of his eyes, grimacing oddly as if about to sneeze, then bends down and strokes the back of his scrawny little three-legged dog. He thinks some more, until finally he loses his self-control and lets out a deep sigh. It’s a momentary show of emotion that lasts less than a second, then he recovers his composure, straightens up, tugs gently on the lead, and whispers something to his pet. Another rapid flash of sunlight bounces off a window and falls, more gently this time, on the proud, glittering thighs of the Puss in Boots as she leaps in mid-air.
The boy has turned again to look at her when he hears the little man’s resigned voice:
“Farewell, my lad, behave yourself. Next week,” he adds as he starts moving away, “they’re showing films I’m sure you’d like, if you could get in. If there are no more rats, they’re putting on ‘Topper’ and ‘The Scarlet Claw’.”
“I’ve already seen ‘The Scarlet Claw’. The murderer is the village postman.”
Fog and marshes, Sherlock Holmes’ hook nose, a bloody metal claw and mutilated corpses gnawed at by rats: he can remember the dark film very clearly as he watches the little man walk off down the street limping slightly, falling in step with his dog’s lopsided gait, occasionally stretching down to give its head a pat, both of them leaning over and treading cautiously as if to avoid invisible obstacles. He turns back to again admire Chen-Li the Cat suspended in mid-air. Everything about her soaring body is fleeting and volatile, beyond reach. She has been caught at the moment she is rising, hoping never to fall, to stay forever fixed in this instant in memory and desire. Ringo peers at her inner thigh, that delicate, taut region that troubles him so. He spots something he had not seen before: it looks like a small tear in the skin, but peering more closely, he realises it is a caterpillar stuck to the glitter. The caterpillar has a greenish back with purple dots. It could have been attracted to the glitter by mistake, thinking it was honey, and yet it is odd to see it there. If it climbed a little higher, it would reach the groin beneath the satin shorts and it wouldn’t take it long to reach the pelvis and then it could even slip inside the dancer’s muff itself. Dark, moist, and sweet. But the insect is not moving. Ringo touches it cautiously, then pushes at it with his fingernail. The caterpillar falls to the ground, stiff as a board.
The Rat-catcher’s poison has even got as far as this, he thinks.
*
He is sitting on the tram with the case on his lap. His father is standing beside him, in the middle of the aisle. It’s a crowded number 24, and is going up Calle Salmerón where it crosses Calle Carolinas. An apologetic, mild-looking priest is shouldering his way through the crowded rear platform, uttering snatches of prayer from thick pink lips. He reaches the aisle, but there are no free seats; lots of passengers are having to stand. The reverend is thickset, with a ruddy complexion, heavy jowls, and a proud head of snowy-white tousled hair. Just the sort of hearty, plain-talking clergyman that my father eats for breakfast every day, the boy groans inwardly, dreading the imminent drama and how ashamed he’s going to feel. His mind is still dazzled by the image of the honeyed thighs of Puss in Boots as he watches the priest advance determinedly along the aisle. He gives a magic blink to shoo him away, but he keeps on coming, and now to make things even worse is staring at him with a smile on his face, as though taking it for granted that this good, well-brought-up young boy is bound to get up and offer him his seat.
His father remains standing beside him, his hand pressing lightly but persistently on his shoulder in a gesture the boy sees as one of possession and authority that embarrasses him in public. His father’s hand is large, with prominent nerves and cracked, greenish skin like a lizard’s. Even when, as now, the hand is resting in a friendly way on his shoulder, or when it is clutching the neck of a wine bottle, or sweeping up crumbs on a tablecloth, or dangling over the edge of the table or the arm of a chair — even when it is cupped very still and peaceful on his mother’s accommodating knee — the boy has always noted a latent fury in the knuckles, a permanent tension. It is so close to his face now that he catches a whiff of rat poison ingrained beneath his father’s fingernails, the same acrid stench impregnated on his rubber boots, his blue overalls and a very strange tool dangling from his belt next to a electric torch that he must use to blind and immobilise the rats before finishing them off. Even stranger and more incongruous is the effect produced by the striped navy-blue jacket he is wearing over his work clothes, a fitted sports jacket in good condition: it is as if from the waist up his father were coming from a posh party, whereas from the waist down he had just emerged from a stinking sewer full of dead rats. For some unknown reason, the boy is suddenly reminded of the little man tapping his foot on the manhole cover with his three-legged dog beside him.
One of the buttons on the chest of the priest’s cassock has come undone, doubtless due to the pushing and shoving on the platform. His bushy eyebrows curl in every direction, and are as white as his impressive mane of hair. By now he is close by and continues to stare at Ringo. The good-mannered boy is thinking he ought to stand up and offer him his seat: at school he has been taught to be polite to women, especially if they are elderly or pregnant, but also to nuns and priests. That is what is expected of the well-educated boys who attend catechism classes. The calloused reptilian hand lifts from his shoulder, which he interprets as a sign of approval and so starts to get up, but no sooner has his backside left the seat than the hand drops on to his shoulder again with such force he is obliged to stay seated.